My house key vanished into the ether today.
I left home this morning, reattaching my house key to my key ring (sometimes I take it off because my car keys are bulky, as is my unicorn keychain) as I walked down the path.
I got home this evening to find that my house key was nowhere to be found.
My car key was there, my unicorn with glowing horn was there, my house key was not.
It was swallowed by another dimension, presumably a dimension that also houses a lot of unpaired socks.
Because I am intrigued by the hows and whys, I’ve been wondering how it happened. Did I not put the key on the ring? I remember starting to put the key on the ring, but I don’t clearly remember finishing. Maybe it only went on half way and fell off later. Maybe it fell off while I was handling it and I was so unconscious, so swallowed by whatever I was thinking, that I didn’t even notice.
Or maybe the ether just ate it, the way it ate my iPhone in 2013 when I left it in my car during dinner and got back to my car to find it still locked, no sign of forced entry, but the phone was just … gone.
Maybe my 2013 phone and my 2019 house key are having a good laugh at me right now, from the dimension with all my socks.
Either way, no house key.
As to the why: first off, is there a why? Maybe, maybe not. If not, if this is just the random whim of the universe, okay, fine. It’s a rather innocuous whim when all’s said and done.
If it’s not a random whim of the universe, it must mean either the universe or my subconscious doesn’t want me to be in my house tonight. (By the time I drive to Petaluma to borrow the nearest set of bolt cutters, there is no way I will be driving back.) Or maybe it wants me to write this blog post? I have been getting lots of blog blog blog guidance and I’ve kind of been ignoring it and we all know what happens when I ignore guidance. (Spoiler: lots of annoying things.)
The only reason I’m writing this now is because I’m sitting in the nearest home-like placed - namely, a Starbucks with water, a bathroom, and sandwiches. Waiting for traffic to clear and my blood sugar to stabilize, thanks to a chicken sandwich the cashier kindly heated up for me, so I can drive to Petaluma and the bolt cutters that will free my house.
(If the bolt cutters thing doesn’t make sense, perhaps I should explain that I live in a glorified garden shed, albeit a Mill Valley garden shed in back of a million dollar garden and with a deck overlooking a stream, and the lock is a padlock. Finest home security available, yo.)
But as blog posts go, this one ain’t exactly revolutionary. And I can’t imagine why my house is off-limits, because I really like my house and I’d really like to be inside it right now.
So, either I am supposed to be blogging or in Petaluma or paying more attention.
It’s not the clearest lesson I’ve ever received, but maybe I just wrote this blog posts too early. Sometimes the answers to questions posed take longer to land than we prefer.
Me, outside a lot of houses, because that feels appropriate for a key-devouring ether post.